Money Supply

MONEY SUPPLY

Money is a collection of liquid assets that is generally accepted as a medium of exchange and for repayment of debt. In that role, it serves to economize on the use of scarce resources devoted to exchange, expands resources for production, facilitates trade, promotes specialization, and contributes to a society's welfare. This theoretical definition serves two purposes: It encompasses new forms of money that may arise as a result of financial innovations related to technological change and institutional developments. It also distinguishes money from other assets by emphasizing its general acceptability as a medium of exchange. While all assets serve as a store of wealth, only a few are accepted as a means of payment for goods and services.

While this definition provides a clear picture of what money is, it does not specify exactly what assets should be included in its measurement. There are several liquid assets such as coins, paper currency, checkable-type deposits, and traveler's checks, which clearly act as a medium of exchange, and definitely belong to its measurement. Several other assets, however, may also serve as a medium of exchange but are not as liquid as currency and checkable-type deposits. For example, money market deposit accounts have check-writing features subject to certain restrictions, and savings accounts can be converted into a medium of exchange with a negligible cost. To what extent such assets should be included in money's measurement is not clear.

As an alternative, economists have proposed defining and measuring money using an empirical approach. This approach emphasizes the role of money as an intermediate target for monetary policy. As Frederic Mishkin pointed out, an effective intermediate target should have three features: It must be measurable, controllable by the central bank, and have a predictable and stable relation with ultimate goals. Thus, an asset should be included in money's measurement if it helps satisfy these requirements. As it appears, evidence on which measure of money has a high predictive power is mixed. A measure that predicts well in one period might not perform well in other times, and a measure that predicts one goal, might not be a good predictor of others.

THE FEDERAL RESERVE SYSTEM'S MONETARY AGGREGATES

The Federal Reserve System (also known as the Fed) has incorporated both the theoretical approach and the empirical approach in constructing its measures of the money supply for the United States. The results are four measures of monetary aggregates, M1, M2, M3, and L, which are constructed using simple summations of some liquid assets. M1 is the narrowest measure and corresponds closely to the theoretical definition of money. It consists of six liquid assets: coins, dollar bills, traveler's checks, demand deposits, other checkable deposits, and NOW (negotiated order of withdrawal) accounts held at commercial banks and at thrift institutions. These assets are clearly money because they are used directly as a medium of exchange.

The M2 aggregate adds to M1 two groups of assets: other assets that have check-writing features such as money market deposit accounts and money market mutual funds shares, and other extremely liquid assets such as savings deposits, small denomination time deposits, overnight repurchase agreements, and overnight Eurodollars. Similarly, the M3 aggregate adds to M2 somewhat less liquid assets such as large denomination time deposits, institutional money market funds, term repurchase agreements, and term Eurodollars. Finally, L is a broad measure of highly liquid assets. It consists of M3 and several highly liquid securities such as savings bonds, short-term Treasury securities, banker's acceptances, and commercial paper.

A potential problem with the simple summation procedure, which underlies the construction of the monetary aggregates, is the assumption that all individual components are perfect substitutes. As William Barnett, Douglas Fisher, and Apostolos Serletis pointed out, this procedure is useful for constructing accounting measures of monetary wealth but does not provide reliable measures of monetary services. As a solution, Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz proposed weighting individual components by their degree of "moneyness," with the weights varying from zero to unity. Another more rigorous solution proposed by Barnett and his colleagues is based on the application of aggregation and index number theory. Evidence along this line of research suggests that these measures of monetary aggregate are superior to the traditional measures in their predictive contents.

Knowledge of money supply process and information about its behavior are important for two interrelated reasons. First, changes in money growth may have significant effects on the economy's performance. Its short-run variations may affect employment, output, and other real economic variables, while its long-run trend determines the course of inflation and other nominal variables. Second, money supply serves as an important intermediate target for the conduct of monetary policy. As a result, discretionary changes in money growth are instrumental in attainment of economic growth, price stability, and other economic goals.

THE MONEY SUPPLY DETERMINATION PROCESS

Three groups of economic agents play an important role in the process of money supply determination. The first and most important is the Fed, which sets the supply of the monetary base, imposes certain constraints on the set of admissible assets held by banks, and on the banks' supply of their liabilities. Next is the public, which determines the optimum amounts of currency holdings, the supply of financial claims to banks, and the allocation of the claims between transaction and nontransaction accounts. The last is banks, which absorb the financial claims offered by the public, set the supply conditions for their liabilities and allocate their assets between earning assets and reserves subject to the constraints imposed by the Fed. The interaction among the three groups is shaped by market conditions, and jointly determines the stock of money, bank credit, and interest rates.

The level of money stock is the product of two components: the monetary base and the money multiplier. The monetary base is quantity of government-produced money. It consists of currency held by the public and total reserves held by banks. Currency is the total of coins and dollar bills of all denominations. Reserves are the sum of banks' vault cash and their reserve deposits at the Fed. They are the noninterest-bearing components of bank assets, and consist of required reserves on deposit liabilities established by the Fed, and additional reserves that banks deem necessary for liquidity purposes.

The Fed exercises its tight control over the monetary base through open market operations and extension of discount loans. Open market operations are the Fed's authority to trade in government securities. They are the most important instrument of monetary policy and the primary source of changes in the monetary base. An open market purchase expands the monetary base while an open market sale works in the opposite direction. The Fed's control of discount loans is the result of its authority to set the discount rate and limit the level of discount loans through its administration of the discount window.

The money multiplier reflects the joint behavior of the public, banks, and the Fed. The public's decisions about its desired holdings of currency and nontransaction deposits relative to transaction deposits are one set of factors that influence the multiplier. Banks liquidity concerns, and thus their desire to hold excess reserves relative to their deposit liabilities, is another set of factors. The Fed's authority to change the required reserve ratios on bank deposits is the third set of factors. Given the rather infrequent changes in the reserve requirements ratios, the multiplier reflects primarily the behavior of the public, private banks, and the market and institutional conditions.

For example, a decision by the public to increase its currency holdings relative to transaction deposits results in a switch from a component of money supply that undergoes multiple expansions to one that does not. Thus the size of the multiplier declines. Similarly, a decision by banks to increase their holdings of excess reserves relative to transaction deposits reduces bank loans, and causes a decline in deposits, the multiplier, and the money supply. Finally, a decision by the Fed to raise the reserve requirement ratio on bank deposits results in a reserve deficiency in the banking system, forcing banks to reduce their loans, deposit liabilities, the money supply, and the multiplier.

HISTORICAL TREND

Over the 1980–2005 period, the M1 aggregate grew at an average annual rate of 1.6 percent, while the M2 aggregate rate was 1.9 percent. Nevertheless, the growth rates were not stable. They varied between the low of −14.5 percent and high of 17.9 percent for M1, and between the low of −6.2 percent and high of 10.2 percent for M2. What factors contributed to the long-run growth and short-run fluctuations in the money supply? During the same period, the monetary base grew at an average annual rate of 4.6 percent primarily because of open market operations. Thus changes in monetary base and open market operations are the primary source of long-run movements in the money supply. For shorter periods, however, changes in the money multiplier may have also contributed to the fluctuations in the money supply.

Friedman, Milton, and Schwartz, Anna J. (1970). Monetary statistics of the United States: Estimates, sources, and methods. New York: Colombia University Press for the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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Money Supply

Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History
COPYRIGHT 2000 The Gale Group Inc.

MONEY SUPPLY

Money supply is the total quantity or volume of money circulating in the economy. Some economists define it narrowly as the total value of coins, paper currency, traveler's checks, and checking account balances at any given time. This definition of the money supply is called "M1." The broader definition of money supply, "M2," adds savings accounts and money market mutual funds. Money supply can also be defined as "M3," which combines M1 and M2 and adds other types of savings deposits and money market funds. At the end of 1998 the total amount of M2 in the United States economy was about $4.4 trillion, while M3 was at $6 trillion.

At about the same time as the United States was being founded, economists were discovering that an economy's money supply had a direct effect on prices and economic growth. The Coinage Act of 1792 defined the value of the U.S. dollar in terms of silver and gold, but after major gold discoveries in the 1830s and in 1849 gold began to replace silver as the standard by which the dollar was defined. The first and second Banks of the United States (1791–1811 and 1816–1836, respectively) tried to control the money supply by making sure that U.S. banks had enough gold on hand to back up the paper bills that they printed and issued. The money supply, however, grew enormously during the American Civil War (1861–1865), when the government began printing "greenbacks" that weren't backed up by gold or silver. By 1879 the dollar was back on the gold standard, and when world gold supplies increased between 1897 and 1914, so did the U.S. money supply.

When the Federal Reserve was created in 1913 it was given the power to control the money supply by increasing or shrinking the amount of currency circulating in the economy. Despite this power, in the early 1930s the Federal Reserve failed to increase the money supply enough to keep the economy from contracting. The resulting Great Depression (1929–1939) led economists who supported the Keynesian economic theory to reject the traditional idea that an economy's health depended on how the money supply was managed. They instead believed that economic growth had to be managed through fiscal policies such as taxation and government spending.

The combined inflation and recession of the 1970s (called "stagflation") convinced a new generation of economists that ineffective government attempts to "fine-tune" the economy through fiscal policy and inconsistent changes in the money supply did not work. Because of these new economic theories in the 1980s, the Federal Reserve began to change the way it reacted to inflation. When inflation rose one percent, the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates 1.5 percent rather than the less aggressive 0.75 percent it would have applied in earlier years. This bolder approach to controlling the money supply was much more effective in controlling inflation. As a result, even though the economy boomed from 1982 through the 1990s inflation remained mild.

See also:Bank of the United States (First National Bank), Bank of the United States (Second National Bank), Federal Reserve System, Gold Standard, Greenbacks, Money

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